The Drag-a-Thon: Even city leaders enjoy the shows at the Palace, but are they too loud? Photos courtesy Juan Saco Mironoff / Miami-Gay-Blog.com

What a Drag
The Tides Hotel Complains Local Drag Performance is Too Loud, but are They Motivated by Something Other Than Noise?

By Lee Molloy

For more than two decades, The Palace at 1200 Ocean Drive has been a staple of South Beach life. Locals and visitors from all over the globe turn up every week to witness one of the last remaining examples of an experience that helped to put South Beach on the tourist map — a full drag show.

“It’s the most entertaining thing on South Beach,” drag queen and regular performer at The Palace, Tiffany Fantasia, told The Lead. “Where else are you going to find a 6-foot-4 drag queen prancing around on the sidewalks, dancing around, and spinning like she’s lost her mind?”

However, one local ‘diva’ is not at all happy with the fabulous competition. The management of the neighboring The Tides South Beach hotel at 1220 Ocean Drive, which is ironically nicknamed ‘The Diva of Ocean Drive’ has been waging a war of complaints against the drag shows at The Palace by calling the City Code Compliance department to say the shows are too loud.

Currently, The Palace has a permit to do live shows on their porch area, but not in their sidewalk café area. The city, however, has been operating something akin to a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell policy,’ where they would not go after the drag shows for code violations unless someone forced their hand by calling in a complaint.

“We started getting a lot of noise complaints that came from The Tides,” Rebecca Wakefield, Chief of Staff to Mayor Matti Bower said. “We sent out code enforcement on every call, but they didn’t substantiate any complaints.”

The frequency of the complaints were such that management of The Palace began to fear that the drag shows could be shut down, which lead to a grassroots Facebook campaign called ‘God Save the (Drag) Queens’ attracting more than a thousand online supporters and resulting in a 14-hour ‘Drag-a-Thon’ on Sunday, Jan. 31.  

General Manager of The Palace Ivan Cano estimates that roughly 200 people attended the drag-a-thon, including Mayor Matti Bower.

“The mayor is very supportive of the gay community,” Wakefield said. “She even showed up on Sunday to show her support.”

The presence of the Mayor, however, was not enough to stop a complaint being called in by the management of The Tides.

“At 12:30 we received a code compliance visitor saying that you’re not supposed to be doing the show and you are going to get a ticket,” Cano said, adding that the code compliance officers also threatened them with calling the police.

The situation reminded at least one drag queen of less enlightened times.

“It was kind of nerve-wracking, with the City telling us that they were going to shut down the show,” Fantasia said. “It was like Stonewall all over again.”

Eventually the Palace management and code compliance officers came to a “peaceful resolution” and, according to Cano, the show was able to go on until 6 p.m. The future of the Sunday performances, however, will depend on sorting out what Cano describes as a “slow, but due process.”

What’s the Motivation?

“This is complete gay harassment,” Cano said.

Miami Beach Board of Adjustment member Sherry Roberts agrees with Cano.

“I definitely believe it’s an anti-gay issue, and that it has nothing to do with noise,” she told The Lead.

However, in a written statement to The Lead, Michael Doneff, spokesperson for the Viceroy Hotel Group, which owns The Tides, maintained that the problem was with the noise. “We have been unable to find a mutually acceptable solution to the noise issues which are impacting Tides hotel guests,” he wrote. “The issue for our hotel is in the disturbance itself, not the nature of the disturbance.”

Fantasia has other ideas, saying that “at first” she thought it was about the noise, but now believes there is more to it, explaining that the persistent complaints to the city started happening around the holidays when The Tides were in the process of “putting out their tables” for a sidewalk café. Fantasia also said that she has witnessed customers at The Tides getting up from their tables and moving over to tables at The Palace when the drag shows were in process.

“At the end of the day, I think it’s more that [The Tides] are losing business than the shows themselves,” Fantasia said.

Ultimately though, Fantasia looks forward to getting the show back on, when the dust finally clears.

“A lot of people in the straight world would love to see a drag show but they don’t feel comfortable going into a gay club, so we bring the show to them,” Fantasia said.